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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28747554">Wish Upon a Beifong</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rmxzuko/pseuds/rmxzuko'>rmxzuko</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blind Character, Episode: s03e12 The Western Air Temple, Gen, POV Toph Beifong, References to Canon, Toph Beifong-centric, Western Air Temple</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 03:26:02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,809</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28747554</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rmxzuko/pseuds/rmxzuko</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>As an earthbender, Toph is grounded. She believes in things she can experience with her senses. The stars are not among those things. So while Aang, Katara, and Sokka take to wishing upon a star for someone besides Zuko to show up and teach Aang how to firebend, Toph decides to solve the problem herself. / A.k.a. what was going through Toph's head when she went to go see Zuko that night at the Western Air Temple.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Wish Upon a Beifong</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I wrote this as a [belated] birthday gift to a good friend, whose favorite ATLA character is Toph. I was a bit nervous to write a Toph-centric fic because Toph Beifong is one of those characters whose personality is so well-established in canon that it's easy to accidentally write her out-of-character, but I believe and hope that I did her justice.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"The stars sure are beautiful tonight. Too bad you can't see them, <em>Toph</em>!"<br/>
</p><p>The earthbender rolled onto her side and, with an aggravated breath, brushed the bangs falling over her face away. The group's token "mom friend" had said her name with the same tone her parents had so often used to say the word "blind," and the reminder of the life she had run away from such a short time ago hurt far more than the reminder of her lack of sight.<br/>
</p><p>… not that it mattered that Katara had spit her name out like a curse. She'd done that only because she wasn't creative enough to come up with an <em>actual</em> insult, like "Sugar Queen." <em>There</em> was an insult! It worked because it was accurate; talking to Katara was like eating sugar. It was everyone's favorite thing to do until the initial excitement and sweetness wore off, at which point everyone fell asleep, unable to bear the boredom any longer.<br/>
</p><p><em>Does the South Pole even</em> have <em>sugar?</em> Toph wondered. She'd had her fair share of sweets because the few bureaucrats who had known of her existence tended to bring her some whenever they visited her father, but she didn't know how widespread confectionaries were outside of the Earth Kingdom's elite. It's not like her parents had ever let her go anywhere to see for herself.<br/>
</p><p><em>Heh. See.</em><br/>
</p><p>She snickered before shaking her head to refocus her attention. She was supposed to be stewing in her indignation!<br/>
</p><p>… and yet she found herself rolling back onto her back, staring up at the same void she always saw, and wondering if Katara even realized that, to her, not being able to see the stars was less upsetting than not being able to join her new friends in marveling at them.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>* * * * * * * * * *</p>
</div><p>	As far as Toph was concerned, that fight had occurred so long ago it had become negligible. She and Katara had made up, the way kids with too-big problems tend to be able to do, and now, Toph would bury anyone who even <em>threatened</em> to hurt Katara—or anyone else in Team Avatar.<br/>
</p><p>However, she'd be a liar if she said she hadn't come close to burying them herself today.<br/>
</p><p>When Zuko had approached the gang, claiming to have changed and offering to teach Aang firebending, Aang, Katara, and Sokka all shot him down immediately, unable to let go of their hurt feelings and put the past behind them.<br/>
</p><p>… until nightfall, that was. The sky had turned dark—or so the others had remarked—and their blistering anger toward their current situation and toward Zuko's audacity dissipated in the face of the universe's awesome beauty. Aang, Katara, and Sokka—along with Haru, Teo, and the Duke—had all congregated at the edge of the temple to look at the stars, while she had stayed behind to think.<br/>
</p><p>She knew what stars were—in theory, at least. She was blind, not stupid. She'd heard her parents muse about the various "starry night" paintings the Beifong family had accumulated over the years and bemoan the fact that Toph would never be able to appreciate their beauty—although whether they meant the actual stars or just the paintings themselves, Toph didn't know. She'd also learned about the Si Wong people, who used the stars to navigate the desert. In addition, in the days following the disaster that was Team Avatar's trip to Wan Shi Tong's library, Sokka had told her all about the planetarium that he'd found there. While Aang and Katara leaned into each other, she and Sokka—the less emotional and more pragmatic members of the group—sought refuge in each other and in thinking about what they <em>could</em> do… like plan to invade the Fire Nation during a solar eclipse that rendered firebenders powerless and lay siege on their capital city in a guerilla version of the legendary Siege of Ba Sing Se.<br/>
</p><p>The invasion had been a bust. But there was no sense dwelling on the past.<br/>
</p><p><em>Or on what's up in the sky</em>, Toph thought, rolling over onto her other side from where she lied within her earthbent tent some distance away from the group's camp. She'd stormed off after their argument about whether or not they should consider letting Zuko teach Aang and she hadn’t returned since. However, she'd set up her own camp close enough that, although the darkness of the night prevented them from seeing her, <em>she</em> could see <em>them</em> if she pressed her feet flat against the ground.<br/>
</p><p>She could hear them, too, and their laughter, full of awe and wonder at something she'd never be able to see, echoed in her mind.<br/>
</p><p>The Air Temples were, according to the others, great places to stargaze. She'd overheard Aang commenting that it had something to do with the vantage point that came with being high up in the mountains, but his explanation hadn't made any sense to her. What difference did a couple kilometers make in the grand scheme of things? The stars were literal lightyears away, and since falling stars weren't actually <em>stars</em>, but meteoroids that had burst into flames upon entering Earth's atmosphere—or so that Ba Sing Se astronomy professor who had come to visit her father had told her when, against her parents' expressed command, she'd wandered into the room to see the stranger—they were never closer than "impossibly far away."<br/>
</p><p>The stars bored her—and not just because she couldn't see them. She was sure that, regardless of how aesthetically pleasing they were to look at, she'd rather sleep than spend her night watching them just sit in the sky. She was a practical girl, and sleeping was, objectively, more productive than staring up at balls of gas or wishing on rocks that had been set ablaze by the speed of their descent.<br/>
</p><p>She still couldn't believe that some people actually thought that falling rocks would do them favors.<br/>
</p><p>As an earthbender—and the best one in the world, at that—Toph believed in rocks. She believed that chucking rocks could solve just about any problem.<br/>
</p><p>… that said, one of the few problems that couldn't be solved by chucking rocks was that there was no member of Team Avatar who could teach Aang how to firebend.<br/>
</p><p>She could mold a boulder into the <em>shape</em> of a flame, but that wouldn't do any good. She couldn't teach Aang how to "feel his inner fire" or whatever the heck it was that firebenders did because earthbending didn't come from the breath; it came from the earth. Indeed, earthbending was as externally based as a bending discipline could get. The only thing earthbenders shared with firebenders was resolve, and even then, earthbenders and firebenders expressed their resolve differently; earthbenders were obstinate and, sure that their opponent would [eventually] yield to their persistence, rarely changed their battle strategy, whereas firebenders would switch tactics as frequently as necessary to win a fight.<br/>
</p><p><em>Yeah</em>, Toph thought with a sigh, <em>I definitely can't teach Aang how to firebend.</em><br/>
</p><p>Alas, Aang, either not caring or not comprehending that he'd never find a teacher by avoiding his need for one, adamantly refused to confront the fact that he needed to learn firebending. And Katara and Sokka, well… they were letting their feelings cloud their judgment. They were so concerned about protecting the group from harm that they couldn't bring themselves to consider working with an enemy, even if doing so was what they needed to do to keep their loved ones—and the entire world—safe.<br/>
</p><p>The three of them were blind, and not in the good way. If they were <em>her</em> kind of blind, they'd know better than to wish on "stars" for a solution to their problem. If there was one thing she'd learned during her time as the Blind Bandit, it was how to be self-reliant.<br/>
</p><p>She didn't like the thought of working with Zuko any more than they did, but she understood that they couldn't depend on the universe for another option. If seeing their allies surrender to the Fire Nation soldiers at the end of the Day of Black Sun invasion had taught them anything, it was that saving the world was on them, and that when push came to shove, they were on their own. There was no secret weapon or supreme being that they could call upon to better their chances or tip the scales in their favor.<br/>
</p><p>The closest thing they had to either was Aang.<br/>
</p><p>Toph believed in Aang. She did, really. Yeah, maybe not quite as wholeheartedly as Katara—despite how common it was in the Earth Kingdom to pray to Avatars, she had never caught on to the habit of praying to people who, in the end, were just as fallible as she was—but she believed in him. He had a good heart and a lot of raw power, and when it came to leadership and stopping a century-long war, that's about all anyone could ask for. However, Aang wasn't omnipotent. They had been reminded of that in the Crystal Catacombs. The world's savior was just a twelve-year-old kid—a twelve-year-old kid equipped with the power and the wisdom of a thousand ancestors and the spirits themselves, yes, but a twelve-year-old kid nonetheless. The fate of the world being vested in his ability to stop a bloodthirsty tyrant was a cruel trick of the universe.<br/>
</p><p>… so she sure as heck was <em>not</em> going to go asking the universe for help. While she'd learned what benefits can come from asking for and receiving help from others every now and then, there was still truth to the old adage "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."<br/>
</p><p>She sat up, determined. The others had gone to bed some time ago, and by now, everyone was likely asleep, probably dreaming of a world in which wishing on a falling space-rock yielded solutions to their problems.<br/>
</p><p>This was the <em>real world</em>, though. It was cruel and ugly, but it was <em>theirs</em>, and it was up to them to save it. There was no clever solution, no trickety-trick. If Aang needed a firebending teacher, they had to invite the torrent of bad decisions and unbridled energy that was Zuko into their camp and let him teach Aang how to firebend.<br/>
</p><p>She stood up, having made up her mind. She'd find Zuko, set aside her own grudge against him, and work something out with him.<br/>
</p><p>She started in the direction her seismic sense told her Zuko's camp could be found, undaunted by the thought of the wrath she'd have to face when Aang, Katara, and Sokka found out about this midnight rendezvous. She might not be able to teach Aang how to firebend, but she could incur and endure her friends' wrath, no problem. She was sure about that.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you liked this fic and want to see more ATLA fics from me, please leave a review! Interaction is the heart of inspiration!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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